2)
There is a visual pleasure in the reconciliation of established disparities.  Creation in general is typified by the progress from un-differentiated material to articulated and specialized pieces, or forms.  A monolithic block of clay is pulled apart in order to be reorganized into sculptural forms which, though they can certainly be regarded as a whole, can also be separated in thought.  It’s possible to regard, as a thing apart, the horns of Michelangelo’s Moses.  It does not appear to be possible to isolate by the same exercise a piece of marble at the center of a block.  Forms which are powerfully, sometimes masterfully articulated out of raw material simply impress themselves on the mind more forcefully than the pieces of an inchoate lump.  The phenomenon of articulation can of course be undone, as sculptures and structures can be unmade into dust, but it can also be reversed on another level.  Materials which have been pulled apart into multiple forms can be, and have been, reunited by higher-level reconciliations, and this is a process which can result in a powerful aesthetic experience.

For instance:
-A sod house.  Earthen material is articulated into new forms, which are then incorporated into a structure which is then situated in a landscape made of itself.
-When Christo and Jean-Claude veiled the Pont Neuf, they exceeded the previous impact of their work, which was mostly a result of scale.  The action of veiling achieved the re-unification of the articulated structure, what emerged under the veil was not merely as a unity of multiple forms (which it had already been by design) but a unit.

Opportunities for the experience of formal reconciliation are everywhere in the natural environment.  Even where they do not echo each other in form or texture, features of the natural landscape are linked by the explanations of biology, through which the chemical relationships of soil to plant to air are made intelligible.  But such occasions are far rarer in the man-made environment in which we spend most of our time.  Here, the landscape is in material, formal, textural, and chromatic disarray.  There is no more radical remedy to this situation than a fresh fall of snow.  Snow makes possible the fulfillment of the desire to live in a world whose parts are integral (this, it occurs to me, is the longing we feel when seeing pictures of a walled European city or a defunct civic building).  It ornaments the world not by accentuating the specific beauty of each part but by suppressing and limiting those differences.  It treats the landscape as a whole; the landscape becomes a whole in reply.

3)
Today, snow is primarily an exigency, to which the proper response is presumed to be preparedness (taking the form of high-traction tires, ergonomic shovels, chemical freeze-depressants, and so on).  In this season of readiness, the romance of snow can easily be lost in an anticipation that mounts to dread.  It wasn’t always this way.  Their harvest put up, old New Englanders waited for the snow to blanket the frozen fields, when they could travel by sleigh to visit at neighboring houses.  For them, snow wasn’t just the means through which their leisure was accomplished, but a symbol for a whole season of rest and celebration.